CONCERT REVIEW | Prokofiev & Shostakovich | Philharmonia Orchestra/Matsuev & Kochanovsky | Royal Festival Hall, London | "Denis Matsuev’s impassioned piano playing in the Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto complemented a superlative performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony"
Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 2
Sibelius, Étude in A minor (encore)
Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7, Leningrad
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| Stanislav Kochanovsky, © Marco Borggreve |
Stanislav Kochanovsky stepped in at short notice to replace Yuri Temirkanov for this concert, and his Philharmonia Orchestra première proved to be a resounding success. Denis Matsuev’s impassioned piano playing in the Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto complemented a superlative performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.
Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, rewritten in 1923 after the original score from a decade earlier was lost in a fire, is amongst the most challenging in the genre, but Matsuev demonstrated such élan in its execution that one may not have guessed that this was such a difficult piece for pianists. From the masterful orchestral playing in lockstep with both Kochanovsky and Matsuev (particularly in the breakneck-speed second movement) to the uniform and consistent calls and responses between the piano and orchestra in the finale, the performance left nothing to be desired. Matsuev played a short encore of Sibelius’ Étude in A minor, further displaying his mastery of delicate articulation and nuanced expression.
The Leningrad Symphony has many memorable moments, chief amongst them a Boléro-like march in the sprawling first movement, a miniature masterclass in orchestration on its own as Shostakovich uses different groups of instruments in each successive repetition of the march theme, accentuating different timbres and colours in one long crescendo. Particularly memorable about Kochanovsky’s execution of this feature was the near-inaudibility of the very first instance of the march theme: one had to actually lean forward to make out the sounds of the violins, and this extreme contrast made the crescendo much more powerful.
The second movement featured excellent solos from oboist Tom Blomfield and bass clarinetist Laurent Ben, leading into a third movement which reconfirmed Kochanovsky’s ability to create stark contrasts with ease. The principal theme of the movement was passed around the orchestra with various augmentations, diminutions, and harmonic variations, but not once was the organic unity of the movement lost—the contrasting section with syncopated brass interjections from opposite sides of the stage was also executed with excellent uniformity of articulation.
The finale of the symphony leads slowly but inexorably to a coda that appears forced and artificial (for all its tremendous volume and bombast) as a result of the overemphasised hammering in of the C major harmony. Not unlike the debated sincerity of the minor-to-major transition at the end of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, the contextual clues and overall peculiarity of the final minutes of this symphony suggest blatant irony rather than true triumph, and it was in this spirit that Kochanovsky’s superlative performance was brought to a deafening close.
Vishnu Bachani